The present invention relates to testing devices that may be used to communicate with an interface of a mass storage device such as an Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) interface or to an ATA Packet Interface (ATAPI) type device. More particularly, this disclosure may relate to testing of a bridging device, which may be used to bridge, for example, a Universal Serial Bus (USB) to a ATA/ATAPI interface.
Available guidelines suggest standards for interfacing storage devices. For example, ATA/ATAPI-6, NCITS Draft specification T13/1410D, Revision 3A, Dec. 14, 2001, available from the American National Standards Institute and hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety, establishes ATA/ATAPI standards that may be used to interface storage devices. Such standards may provide a protocol for how to pass commands to a storage device and how these commands may be interpreted and dealt with.
Storage devices of an ATA type interface may include, for example, hard drives, or removable media drives—e.g., disk drives, flash memory card interfaces, micro-drives and the like—those that may not support packet-type transfers. Storage devices of an ATAPI type interface may include, for example, CD-ROMs, CD-Recordable, CD-RW, DVD, tape drives, super-floppy drives, some ZIP drives and the like. Generally, when a host Operating System (OS) needs to access an ATA/ATAPI device, an OS Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), or other Input/Output (I/O) subsystem, may obtain an access command and pass the command to the storage device.
In some data communication systems, a bridge may translate a protocol of one bus to another protocol for accessing an ATA/ATAPI type storage device. Such a configuration may be established to allow system expansion to external portable drives. For example, a Universal Serial Bus (USB) may carry USB communications having ATA/ATAPI information carried or encapsulated therein. The bridge may receive the USB communications and decipher ATA/ATAPI commands therefrom for accessing the storage device.
To assure proper functionality of such ATA/ATAPI type bridges, it may be helpful to test these bridges and the mass storage interface under various conditions.